This site examines a variety of commonly held beliefs that arguably do not withstand close scrutiny. Sometimes those beliefs are just careless mistakes, but more often they are superstitions, delusions, and sometimes outright hoaxes promulgated for profit. Sometimes these delusions are delusions of sense - they are examples of pure verbiage that only masquerade as making sense.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Plagiarism and Cheating: How Wrong is it Really?

How wrong is it to plagiarize or cheat? Count the ways. Read about it on a PDF by clicking here or read on this blog by clicking "Read more" below.

Plagiarism
and Cheating:How Wrong is it, Really?

W.J. Holly, Ph.D., Philosophy

I.Allowing Cheating Harms Cheaters:

(a)When we allow academic dishonesty, we are remiss in our duties to the
cheaters, and are doing them no favor.Part of our job is to help them acquire knowledge and skills they need
to be competent employees and good citizens.When students are allowed to cheat, they are not acquiring the
knowledge and skills they need.These deficits could cause them serious difficulties in later life.

(b) When students cheat and
plagiarize, they are practicing lying, and they are corrupting their souls.They are lying to the instructor, to the
institution, and to future employers, fraudulently presenting themselves as
having acquired knowledge and skills that they do not have.When
instructors and administrators allow academic dishonesty, they are accomplices
to the fraud that is being perpetrated.When they give credit for dishonest work, they are actively rewarding
and reinforcing dishonest behavior.They
are contributing to the moral corruption of their students.

II. Allowing Cheating Harms Honest Students:

(a)
Honest students may receive lower grades than they deserve when the
class is graded on a curve.Indeed, the
grades they receive might be lowered by comparison to undetected plagiarism
even if the instructor is not consciously grading on a curve.

(b)It is a violation of justice toannounce that all students will be graded on the quality of their work,
and then to grade the honest according to this rule, while allowing others
to get equal or even better grades through cheating rather than through
learning.

(c)Allowing cheating can corrupt honest students who see dishonesty
rewarded.They may come to think that
dishonesty is the only way to compete in a dishonest environment, or that it is
not so bad after all because so many people do it and because the instructors
and administrators do not seem to take
it seriously. Corruption of these
students deprives the community of contributions (intellectual and other) these
students might have made, had they not
become corrupted.

(d)When the instructor discovers that some students have cheated, honest
students can unfairly fall under suspicion of being cheaters too. Moreover, honest students whose work is
plagiarized can be penalized for crimes they did not commit.

(e)Cheating deprives honest students learning experiences that they
might otherwise have had.Instructors today can be reluctant to assign take-home essays and papers
that the students can write, mull over, and rewrite, because instructors have
no way of knowing whether or not papers written at home are the students’ own
work.They can be reluctant to assign
questions on tests that require the use of calculators because electronic devices today can be used for
cheating, for storing answers, and for communicating with other students inside
or outside the testing area.Even
translators and dictionaries must be denied students taking tests because these
too are easily used for cheating.

(f)Dealing with cheating can be enormously time-consuming (checking the net
and text to document plagiarism, using markers to highlight copied sentences, etc.).This is time stolen from honest students,
time that should be spent preparing better lectures, writing helpful comments
on their papers, correcting their grammar, etc.

(g)Since the space available in classrooms is limited, there are many honest
students who cannot enroll in the classes they need or want because those spaces are occupied by cheaters,
students who are abusing the educational opportunity financed by taxpayers.

(h)The value of an honest student’s diploma is diminished when the
community becomes aware that the awarding institution allows cheating.

(i)Honest students who earned their grades are at a disadvantage in
applying for scholarships, graduate school, and jobs.They are competing with people who have
equally good and perhaps superior transcripts that have been fraudulently
obtained.Jobs, scholarships, and places
in graduate school that should have been theirs, are given to liars and cheats.

(j) When you take another preson’s
ideas or writings without their permission and without giving them credit -- it
is theft, it is stealing their work.

III.Allowing Cheating Harms the
Larger Community:

(a)Part of our job is to help students to become well prepared and
competent employees, and to certify their competence.When we certify cheaters, we are harming employers who will be
hiring people who lack the skills and knowledge that we have certified -- and
who will be hiring liars and cheats on our recommendation.

(b) The customers who hire or who
are served by cheats also will suffer by being served by people with
substandard skills, knowledge gaps, and character flaws.In some areas, this could be fatal. Suppose
that one of our students is allowed to obtain a degree in respiratory therapy
through cheating.A patient could die as
a result of this student’s incompetence.Even language deficiencies that we ignore when graduating students might
result in clerical mistakes that could cause economic and health related
disasters for the people being served by those we have certified to be
linguistically competent.

(c)Allowing cheating harms parents, taxpayers, the State, & those who
contribute money for scholarships.We are paid to educate, not to pass on
cheaters.To the extent that we
allow cheating, we are not doing the jobs we are paid to do.

The job of students at MJC is to
gain an education.To the extent that
they cheat rather than doing their job, they
owe a refund to the taxpayers, their parents, and others who have provided
money for their education.To cheat
and to allow cheating in college is
to engage in fraud and theft, to take money under false pretenses from those
who are paying good money to provide the opportunity for education.

I once heard a person say,
"Cheaters only hurt themselves."Obviously that person had not given the topic more than a half minute of
thought.